For tourists all over world, it’s hard to avoid meeting touts and scammers coming up with ever new tourist scams. These cheats are always looking for new ways of stealing money from unsuspecting tourists. We have written this article to help tourists avoid losing money due to such scams .
Some common tourist scams faced by travelers
1) Let’s go to this shop owned by a friend of mine
For shady guides and taxi-drivers, it’s a very common line. They offer tourists a free tour of a shop, factory, showroom etc and claim that it’s just part of the tour or owned by a friend and they are under no pressure to buy anything. But once tourists enter the premises, salesmen don’t let anyone leave easily without buying anything. They will find any excuse to keep you in and it could go on for a long time. The unsuspecting tourists are very often tricked in to buying useless, overpriced items like rugs, clothes or random trinkets at hugely inflated prices
2) Providing false information
This is also very common and there are numerous variations. Latest one we heard was from an American guest of ours who wanted to visit Red Fort (Lal Qila) in Delhi. He was staying in a hotel Paharganj, which is a drive of 15 minutes from Red Fort. When he started searching for an auto-rickshaw to take him there, a random guy from street came up to him and offered him to take him there in his ‘private car’, and for fare, quoted a price which was 6 times the fare of an auto-rickshaw. He tried to bluff by saying that only private cars were allowed inside the fort due [...]